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Sunday, 31 March 2013

EASTER SPECIAL: A Trip to Easter Island

Geography with Dan once
featured an article about Christmas Island; it gave my blog a certain festive
feel during the season. And so, I continue the tradition this weekend, with a
spotlight on its sister, 'Easter Island'.

As one more piece of chocolate slowly melts away and slides
down the gullet, you're flicking through the holiday catalogues in search for a
perfect summer location, but it's unlikely you'll find even a mention of Easter
Island. After all, it's been described as "one of the most isolated places
in the world". 2600 miles east of Polynesia, and 2300 miles west of Chile,
it's a mere freckle in the Pacific, and only 63 square miles in area itself.
It's geological history, it being a volcanic outcrop, makes it one of the
remote pocketson the planet.

Remote, yes, but not uninhabited. Settlers arrived around
400 AD, and colonists grew to about 7000. "They parcelled the island into
small territories and ultimately turned on one another in the drawn-out
paroxysms of societal and environmental collapse" as my National Geographic reports from March
1993. And yet, although they charred their mark upon the landscape, the island
shaped their souls.
Make a visit today, and a fraction of this quintessential
primitive lifestyle is still observable. Local knowledge and community culture
has only enhanced as a result of the isolation from both occident and orient
societies, and what's more, Easter Island evokes great speculation due to the
impressiveness of its archaeological sites.

But why 'Easter' Island? Does it hold religious
significance? Well, no. As you peel the foil off another egg on this Easter
Sunday, consider that the Europeans founded this small island on this day in
1722. Recently, a wave of modernisation has taken place. A surge of amenities
that have brought 640 hotels and 530
motor vehicles. Telephones have been introduced as well as the fax machine.
Having said this, the present day community of 2800 live in a concentrated
region, in Honga Roa on the South West Coast. Since 1965, in particular, a
large transformation has been introduced, induced somewhat by a young
school-teacher's open letter of protest to the Chilean government about living
conditions on the island. The protest led to the end of military rule, giving
Easter Island the civil status it perhaps needed. Two years later, an air
service made a base on the island and the tourist industry started to grow.

One of the sights many fly thousands of miles to espy upon
are the 'Moai'. Artisans carved the Moai centuries ago from volcanic rock at a
quarrya mile away, using stone tools.
These figures range between 4 and 33 feet and weigh up to 80 tons; they
embellish the island's primal atmosphere, and give the island a sense of human
resilience and ingenuity. Others suggest the contrary and some advise that Easter
Island is a "cautionary parable"; a society destroying itself by
wrecking it's environment.

Pulitzer Prize Winner,Jared Diamond, presents this island as "the clearest example of a
society that destroyed itself by over-exploiting its own resources and a
worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future." She
goes on to say that the "Moai accelerated its self destruction"
calling them "power displays where people competed by building the biggest
statues."

In my own opinion, and I can't possibly speak from
experience, but from understanding nonetheless, the lives of the islanders,
both past and present, is a testament that there is still strength, despite the
confines of the island. They sustain an ingenuity to exploit natural
resources,realising circumstances may
indeed change. They are unique, in a way. For once, here's an island where inhabitants
know who they are, where they live, and what their role is in society.